Many gays are still trapped in a closet—the Republican closet. According to CNN exit polls over the last 10 years, with each passing election, more and more self-identified gays vote Republican (now over 30%). Shocking! Lincoln aside, weren’t Republicans the ones who had a tea party and told us we weren’t welcome? What gives? Are they self-hating masochists, or are these Log Cabin folks just revealing their true selves?
Politics can wreak havoc on relationships. A study released in October out of Stanford has shown that political disagreements are more difficult to bridge than racial or religious differences, and that political affiliation has become a litmus test for relationships. Marriage across party lines is extremely rare. So before you move too quickly on that Scruff date, you may want to find out which way he leans.
A first clue could be his name. A non-partisan political tech company called Crowdpac scoured the records of all political donations since 1980 and found that some first names are more conservative than others. (It’s more like a horoscope than a blood test, but interesting nonetheless.) The five most conservative names? Doyle, Billy, Eldon, Lamar and Buddy. Yes, Buddy, your dog’s name. My own name, Greg, indicates a fairly conservative person five times more likely to contribute to a political campaign than the average person, but my given name, Gregory, is less conservative and less likely than others to hand money over. Hmmm. Maybe this isn’t so accurate.
It isn’t your name that makes you liberal or conservative, but it may be in the genes of those people who named us in the first place. According to a study published in the July edition of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, it’s not conscious decision-making nor parental upbringing that fully explains our political affiliations—it may be our physiological responses and deep-seated psychology that lean us left or right.
It appears conservatives tend to have more intense reactions to negative images, such as people eating worms, burning houses or maggot-infested wounds. This finding was recently backed up by another team of scientists who published an article in Current Biology showing that brain responses to maggot-infestations (that again?), rotting carcasses and dirty toilets indicate how liberal or conservative one person is with 95-98% accuracy. It seems political ideology—being conservative or liberal—is as highly heritable as height.
And being conservative affects one’s personality. Conservatives have been found to be quicker to focus on the negative, to spend longer looking at the negative and are more distracted by the negative as well. These negative nellies are also more alert to threats. As a result, they tend to emphasize stability and order and are less likely to be swayed by emotional arguments or passion. Even so, they report being happier than liberals as individuals, maybe because they support the status quo and believe socioeconomic hardships are a result of individual shortcomings.
Liberals have their own set of issues. A study out of Tel Aviv University in Israel demonstrated that liberals are far more emotion-driven and more likely to change their minds and support different policies according to their emotional reactions. According to a study recently published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, people who live in countries with liberal policies reported higher life satisfaction than those countries with less liberal policies. Oddly enough, those with the highest levels of well-being are conservatives who also have the benefit of living in a liberal country.
Maybe we need both—conservatives to maintain the status quo and liberals to push progress and innovation. A conservative-only world would get boring awfully fast, and a liberal-only world would go off the rails in no time. Maybe nature wants a little balance.
Now, I am not saying that someone who is born conservative (or liberal) can’t change.
Community, friends and co-workers—and the relentless denial of basic human rights—can all play a role in breaking free of the Republican strong-hold (hello, Libertarians). I am saying we need to be a little more compassionate to our conservative brothers. Let’s not be crazy and try to send them to reparative therapy or expect them to just “get it.” Baby, they were born that way.